Fenrir Battle Armor - Technical Readout 3058U page 37
The Fenrir Battle Armor is a mixture of highs and lows. On the one hand it has incredible firepower and a high ground speed, but on the other hand it lacks jump capability and its armor is pitiful, especially by the standards of other Assault suits. Firmly establishing the Lyran's trend towards quad designs, the Fenrir can be viewed as an upgunned and faster version of the Sloth, which isn't exactly a stunning pedigree given the poor performance of that suit. At least the Fenrir looks better, although again the Sloth doesn't set a high benchmark.
Another of the early Battle Armor designs that first appeared in the Field Manuals, in this case the one for the Lyran Alliance, the Fenrir was labeled as an Assault class suit from the beginning; although at the time we had yet to see any construction rules to put this into context. Development of the Fenrir began in November 3057 at the behest of Katherine Steiner-Davion as just one measure to underline the independence of the newly formed Lyran Alliance, after she'd led them to secede from the Federated Commonwealth. Basing their new design upon the Sloth rather than an entirely new concept, this could perhaps be viewed as a lack of imagination or maybe even inexperience on behalf of the Lyran designers, but more likely it was a simple desire to get a viable design into production as soon as possible. The Sloth's entry in Technical Readout 3058U does appear to support the latter view, since it's noted that the Sloth's NAIS design team was mostly staffed by Lyrans, although it doesn't preclude the possibility that it was the Suns personnel that drove most of the FedCom's Battle Armor development, in particular for the technology needed for bipedal suits.
The ability of quad suits to carry a heavier payload than equivalent bipedal suits was a key feature for the Lyrans, and they opted to push this side of the armor, firepower and mobility triangle over the other factors. Able to mount no less than 800kg of weaponry, the shining star of the initial configurations was the Medium Pulse Laser, which was the largest weapon available to Battle Armor at the time. Another innovative feature was the introduction of the Configurable Turret Mount, which mimics both the flexibility of the Modular Weapon Mount and the turrets used for centuries by armored vehicles. The latter is an apt comparison given that the Fenrir - like the Sloth before it - is driven more like a vehicle than worn like a suit, with the driver or pilot sitting in a cramped cockpit. As shown in the recent errata for the Tech Manual, turrets now provide additional internal volume, instead of absorbing existing space, providing much needed extra equipment slots at the expense of the mass required for the turret mechanism.
One improvement of the Omni-like turret system over the modular system used on bipedal suits like the Elemental or Inner Sphere Standard, is that more than one weapon can be installed up to the limits of the available mass and turret space. In the case of the Fenrir, as an alternative to the Medium Pulse Laser, this capacity allowed for double and even triple arrays of lighter weapons, or bulky multi-shot, multi-tube missile launchers. Altogether, this provided the suit with an incredible level of firepower, greater than any other Battle Armor available at the time. For RPG scenarios, installing the weaponry in a turret also saved the Fenrir from the ignominious fate of the Sloth, which could often find itself outflanked by the enemy, and unable to return fire even as it took hits to its sides and rear.
Matching the increase in firepower over the Sloth, the Fenrir also benefited from an increase in mobility, pushing its ground speed to the limits of the Assault quad chassis. Capable of moving a third faster than the Sloth, the Fenrir can even keep pace with many of the Heavy and Assault 'Mechs and tanks in the LAAF's ranks, as long as they keep to walking or cruising speed. This was a useful improvement given that quad suits are incapable of using Mechanized Battle Armor tactics, but sadly the boost in mobility was not enough to make the Fenrir any more difficult to hit on the battlefield. Both the Sloth and Fenrir suffer doubly from the lack of jump jets, losing out on the targeting penalty that jumping imposes, as well as struggling to cope with rough terrain such as hills and woods, which can often limit their ability to dart from cover to cover while retaining a Target Movement Modifier.
The Fenrir's poor ability to dodge enemy fire only heightens the design's vulnerability due to its awful level of protection. Mounting a mere five point of armor, the Fenrir can be destroyed by the same weapon that comprises its heaviest configuration, and the strong possibility of LAAF units encountering the Clan version of the Medium Pulse Laser did not bode well for the Fenrir's survivability. Despite this obvious weakness, the LAAF chose to put the Fenrir into production in January 3060 after fifteen months of testing, with troopers assigned to the Fenrir given instructions to attempt to overwhelm the enemy through firepower before their Battle Armor's defensive flaws can be exploited. While this might work well in-universe, within the artificial constraints of the BattleTech combat system, the simultaneous nature of attacks cannot prevent return fire in most situations. This forces Fenrir players to either accept heavy losses in the hopes of inflicting greater damage, or they have to very carefully control when and who they attack, looking for enemy units already heavily engaged or foes that they can outrange or that lack the ability to deal out heavy damage in return.
Unfortunately for the Fenrir, based upon my experience of both using and facing the design in combat, most players are well aware of its peculiarities, often resulting in it being targeted early in the fight, before its opponents find themselves heavily engaged against other units. The possibility of taking out what is effectively a light 'Mech in firepower terms by inflicting just 24 points of damage is just too good an opportunity to overlook. For this reason, some players prefer to only use it in scenarios where they can use the Hidden Unit rules, at least allowing their Fenrirs a good chance of getting in at least one solid attack before being destroyed. If you have access to some fast APCs with the bay capacity to handle Assault suits, you can instead hold your Fenrir suits out of range of the enemy until battle commences, and then dash in to exploit an opportunity, but that tactic has its own risks. The safest scenarios for the Fenrir can be ones where they're almost an afterthought, operating alongside large numbers of heavyweight 'Mechs, however that can make the Battle Armor all but pointless compared to the combat capability already available.
The Fenrir's initial armament configurations offer a variety of useful options, able to address both infantry and armored targets. The primary anti-armor selections are the impressive Medium Pulse Laser and what was the largest missile launcher seen on a Battle Armor design up to that time. Possessing no less than four SRM tubes with four salvos loaded in the magazine, the Fenrir's missile configuration is particularly powerful against vehicles, able to cripple and destroy many opponents with a single shot. When equipped with Infernos, a Fenrir SRM squad can be brutal against infantry - both conventional and Battle Armor alike - with an average salvo able to kill an entire platoon of PBIs or three suits of even the most heavily armored suits, barring certain fire resistant designs. The Fenrir's lighter weaponry choices can be just as powerful, but their lack of range can be a major hindrance. The twin Small Pulse Laser configuration shares the accuracy of the Medium version and adds greater capability against infantry, while the triple Small Laser and triple Machine Gun arrays offer a savage attack against infantry while remaining effective against armor. Although short ranged, the Small Laser configuration offers the greatest potential damage, keeping it a popular choice for close quarters combat.
Technical Readout 3058U introduces two more configurations, which are first deployed in 3064, with one of them being the best possible armament choice for the Fenrir in my opinion. The Extended Range Medium Laser is a hard hitting weapon, but more importantly its 12 hex range allows the Fenrir to stand off out of reach of many lighter weapons, reducing the amount of return fire even while it punishes the foe. What is dubbed the Mortar configuration is less than impressive, fielding a Heavy Mortar alongside a single Machine Gun. While such an armament sounds like a good choice - at least judging by the standards of real world weaponry - within BattleTech, the Battle Armor-scale mortars lack indirect fire capability and can use only simple HE rounds. With only mediocre damage, albeit with good capability against conventional infantry, and average range for Battle Armor weaponry, the mortar is a poor investment of the hefty 400kg it requires. At the very least the Mortar configuration does show that Configurable Turret Mounts can carry mixed armaments, but that's the best that can be said of it.
The last configuration appears in Record Sheets 3058U Clan & Star League as a development of the Jihad, being added in 3071 to exploit new laser technology created by the Blakists. Whether the VSP model at first used captured Small VSPs or ones built in Lyran factories isn't clear, but at some point the Lyrans will obviously have to start building the weapon if this configuration is not to fade away. Like the Mortar configuration, the Small VSP is backed up by a smaller weapon, in this case the rather anemic Automatic Grenade Launcher. While the configuration does offer an interesting change from more common weapon choices, it offers little in the way of improved performance. Oddly, there's no flamer configuration, which would have offered a powerful heat attack as well as truly horrifying anti-personnel capability, nor has the LAAF exploited the availability of the various Battle Armor-scale electronic systems, such as TAG and ECM.
The Fenrir only has a single variant, an experimental prototype at that, which was published in Experimental Technical Readout: Steiner. The Fenrir "Longshot" continues the design's trend of mixing the good with the bad, although it is at least more heavily armored than the standard model, if only marginally so. Removing the turret to free up mass, the engineers mounted no less than 10 Clan-specification LRM tubes, split between two launchers, allowing the Longshot variant to inflict decent damage at incredible range for Battle Armor. Unfortunately, the armament is supplied with a mere pair of salvos for each weapon, which can force the trooper to hold fire until the range closes and thus accuracy increases. Of course, the trooper could opt to stagger the shots, halving firepower to double duration, but a better choice would have been either a single launcher or smaller versions, freeing up mass and space for a greater number of shots.
The Clantech missile launchers are not the only experimental technology installed in the Longshot, with the addition of a C3 system that was reverse-engineered from captured Blakist equipment. Rather than using the Longshot purely as a C3 spotter, I would exploit the system to allow it to place accurate long range shots until the magazines run dry and only then attempt to move in closer to provide targeting data for other units in the network. That said, the Lyrans currently possess so few of the prototypes that really they can't afford to be risked, so once the missiles are gone, the suits should be withdrawn.
While the Fenrir's weaponry and ground speed may be impressive, overall the key advantage of the design is that it's fielded by the army that believes in the famed Wall of Steel. With massed ranks of LAAF Heavy and Assault BattleMechs and tanks leading the way and distracting the foe, the Fenrir's poor protection is less of a liability, but inevitably sooner or later an enemy unit will focus its attention and the Battle Armor will melt away like ice in a heat wave. I know players who like the Fenrir, and it can sometimes perform well, but those times are typically few and far between, and for me it's simply another example that the Lyrans just don't get Battle Armor. The Fenrir could so easily be improved while retaining much of its current character, but instead it remains a heavyweight boxer with a glass jaw.
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